Albert Williamson Webb (1810–1866)

Albert Williamson Webb was a medical doctor in Chicot County in the 1830s and ’40s. He also served six years as an elected Chicot County official. In 1847, he moved his practice to Little Rock (Pulaski County), where he was active in the city’s economic and civic affairs. As a wealthy resident of the city, Webb consorted with the leading politicians and capitalists of the state. After the Civil War, on June 6, 1866, the Little Rock City Council appointed him to fill a vacant city council seat. A week later, he and his teenage son, Mott, were murdered by a robber as they were sleeping, each done in by axe blows to the head. Two men were convicted for the murders in circuit court trials, but the Arkansas Supreme Court overturned the verdicts.

Born in North Carolina in 1810, Albert Webb was living in Columbia, a Chicot County town on the Mississippi River, when Arkansas became a state in 1836. That year, voters elected him Chicot County treasurer, but he was seriously wounded on election day when an African American man, reportedly upset when he was not allowed to vote, stabbed him. Shortly after the stabbing, the attacker (named Bunch in newspaper reports) was lynched by an enraged crowd. Webb recovered from his injuries, and he was reelected to a second two-year term as treasurer; afterward, he served a term as the county judge of Chicot County.

In the middle of the 1840s, Webb started living part of the time in Little Rock, and in September 1846, he married Sarah Quail in a wedding held at the residence of Governor Thomas Drew. About five months later, in February 1847, Webb posted a newspaper notice announcing that he had moved his medical practice permanently to the city. It was “large and lucrative,” and with his wealth he purchased several enslaved people, erected a fashionable house at Capitol Avenue and Cumberland Street, and acquired at least one office building. In 1850, he briefly owned the Arkansas Gazette after its owner defaulted on debt payments to him and two other investors.

As a longtime Mason, Webb served on the governing board of St. Johns’ College. He also was active in the city’s medical community as a member of the local Board of Health (1849–1856) and as an officer of the city and county medical association formed in 1853. In 1860, Arkansas’s governor appointed him surgeon general of the Arkansas Militia, with the rank of colonel. After the Civil War, he was elected president of the local medical association, and in May 1866, he was one of five physicians appointed to the city’s newly reconstituted Board of Health. On June 6, city aldermen selected him to fill a vacancy on the city council.

The brutal assault on Webb and his son on June 13, 1866, was the “most horrible murder that had ever occurred in Little Rock,” according to the Little Rock Pantograph. Moving quickly, police charged six men with the murders, three of them African American. Three murder trials were held in the Pulaski County circuit court during the first half of 1867. Two Black defendants, Simpson Brown and Adolphus Flanagan, were found guilty and sentenced to hang. A white defendant was acquitted. The executions were halted by the state Supreme Court due to procedural errors at the trial. At Brown’s second trial in 1868, the circuit court jury pronounced him not guilty, and Flanagan was not retried. No one else was ever charged with the murders.

Webb is buried in the family plot in Mount Holly Cemetery, where the remains of his son Mott and his wife Sarah Quail Webb (who had died in 1853) are also located. That cemetery is also the resting place of Webb’s daughter Mary C. Tucker (1836–1881), who was the wife of Sterling H. Tucker.

For additional information:
Durning, Dan. “The 1866 Murders of Dr. A. W. Webb and His Young Son Mott, A Story with a Surprise Ending.” Pulaski County Historical Review 73 (Spring 2025): 9–21.

“Horrible Murder of Dr. A. W. Webb and Son.” Des Arc Citizen [reprinted from the Little Rock Pantograph], June 23, 1866, p. 2.

“Negro Hung in Chicot County.” Weekly Arkansas Gazette, August 23, 1836, p. 3.

Untitled story [the Murder of Dr. Webb and son], Arkansas Gazette, June 15, 1866, p. 2.

Dan Durning
Birch Bay, Washington